mike.mainguy

My internet service provider is a bit dicey and I occasionally need to be on the Internet even when they are figuring out how to reboot their remote router when they lose connectivity. So I thought I would just tether my smartphone (Droid ERIS) to my computer. After a bit of searching, I came up with a couple requirements. I didn't want to root my phone. While this is technically a cool thing to do, I just don't want to do that right now. I need to be able to connect natively to an Ubuntu linux machine. All my computers are currently running ubuntu and I didn't want to screw around with wine or a virtual machine. Enter easytether. In 5 minutes I had internet connectivity... here's what I did: downloaded easytether downloaded the ubuntu driver to the phone connected the phone to the computer (via usb) installed the .deb located in phone's download folder ran easytether on the phone ran "easytether enumerate" on my computer ran "sudo dhc...

Here's a copy of my verizon bill: My first reaction is "Hey, I don't owe anything"... However, from experience I think I DO, and I think it might be $127. Unfortunately, by putting a big $0 for my balance at the top, people generally are going to stop and simply assume they didn't owe anything. I've called Verizon about this a few times and 2/3 times the person I talk to ALSO thinks that I don't owe anything. I then need to talk them through my billing history for 15 minutes before they realize I DO in fact owe something. Usually this is after a supervisor gets involved and starts trying to explain complicated billing cycles and all sort of things that neither I nor the CSR actually care to know anything about. This is how NOT to design an online bill presentation screen, they've taken intimate knowledge about how their internal billing and accounting systems work and broadcast it all the way to the customer. In addition to frustration, this...

As a guy with a reputation of knowing something about computers, I often get hit up for tech advice from folks. Recently, a cousin of mine sent me a note asking about what sorts of things I post online and what I don't. Evidently he had been aware of a situation where kids used information from spokeo.com to commit crimes. Personally, I think this is pretty interesting and a really good question. I say this because I think a lot of non-tech folks have not yet made the transition from "off line" to "online". Many technical people have already had to deal with this (often years ago), but many younger folks and/or non-technical people are just beginning to understand the implications of being truly "online". For example, here is a post from 7 years ago by some buffoon (that's me) who decided a to post an off topic friday afternoon 833r discussion. This will likely be available for a very very long time. From my perspective, this is a prett...

I have a situation where I need to be able to have sub groupings of users in Active directory to manage who can see particular pieces of information. It turns out this is easy, but unintuitive. An important detail is to realize that groups can be put inside into other groups and you can use the "member" and "memberOf" attributes to determine who is in which group. So if you have an OU in Active directory called "OU=web,DC=mainguy,DC=org" and you create a group with a name of "CN=Germany National Sales,OU=web,DC=mainguy,DC=org". From here in Active directory you create any number of subgroups and put them in the parent group (under the same OU in our example, but that's not necessary). At this point, you can dump users into any of the groups and you can get segregate users into nested structures. With a little creativity you can use recursion to have deeper nesting (not necessarily a good thing) as well as a "deny/allow" capab...

OK, I realize from a previous post that it in a previous post it may seem like I think that windows is completely non-functional in a cloud environment. Let me back up a little... From my perspective, running production servers on virtual machines spun up on demand is not useful (yet) with the windows operating system. The windows OS strategy is just not responsive enough to this sort of business requirement (yet). That having been said, I just finished spinning up a windows 2003 server instance on rackspace... Why? I need to investigate some Active Directory problems we're trying to solve at work right now. I spent 4 hours downloading the massive DVD install image (and a bunch of crazy MS registration stuff) for a 10 day TRIAL version of the OS. I then went over to my rackspace account (because of a different problem) and realized they could set up the server I needed. I clicked "create server" and they set up a virtual server in 15 minutes. Yes, it costs ...

I happened to notice that mygopher.com doesn't seem to work properly with firefox 3.6 OR google chrome... That's about 25-50% of "normal" web traffic. Note: if the techie people show you log files that indicate firefox is really only 5% (or some other low number).... ask them "how could ANYONE with firefox possibly be using the site if it doesn't actually WORK with firefox?". I used to be a little self conscious about posting gripes about browser compatibility, but now that I see the real numbers from a number of sites that get millions of hits, I'm fairly confident that firefox (and even crome) are actually pretty important at this point. Right now I support a couple of non-technical sites that get millions of hits per month and IE gets around 70% firefox gets around 20% and chrome gets around 5% (the rest is a mixed bag). I'd recommend letting the tech folks take about a week and make the site at least work with these browsers. In al...

Quick question, "why is windows not suited for deployment in the cloud?" Take a look at amazon's pricing . Next, take a look at rackspace linux and windows pricing. Do you notice anything? A keen observer might see: #1 Windows costs between 1.5x - 2.6x more than linux per compute cycle. #2 Windows is in BETA for the rackspace cloud. Now some folks might argue that this cost is offset by fact that windows servers are more managable (after all, you get a nice pointy clicky user interface right?). Those folks should try to push an update to 100 windows servers using the pointy clickly technique. Any administrator worth their salt is going to use scripting and automated deployment techniques which is where linux really shines. Windows as a desktop platform is pretty good (although ubuntu is catching up, but it windows as a server platform still suffers from it's high TCO. All this having been said, I guess I'll restate my subject in a slightly d...

First off, let me qualify this post by saying I am a former employee of Sears Holdings Corporation which is the parent company for Kmart . As such, I happen to still use their insurance through COBRA and because of the plan offered, my insurance only allows me to use Kmart (and VERY few other) pharmacies. Last night I was supposed to go to Kmart and refill a prescription for my son. As circumstances would have it, I forgot so ultimately, I probably contributed to the stress levels associated with this situation. We happened to have one dose left of his medication so we assumed it wouldn't be a big deal to pick it up in the morning. My wife thought she could just run to the pharmacy this morning and get a refill. This morning, I happened to be attending a software development conference in Chicago (coincidentally with at least one, if not more than one SHC associate) and started receiving frantic calls from my wife. She went to TWO different Kmart pharmacies ( 10 miles apa...